Cincinnati
1
Responding to the “Calamity in Detroit”
The 1940s
Popular belief notwithstanding, common threats such as economic downturns and external enemies did not fully unite Americans, nor did they calm ethnic, labor, or racial hostility in the United States during the twentieth century. Italians were lynched until at least 1915, Mexicans and Chinese through the 1930s, and blacks well into the 1960s. Growing ethnic antagonism resulted in severe immigration restriction laws being enacted in the early 1920s. In an effort “to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity,” federal legislation was passed to cap the numbers of Southern and Eastern European as well as African immigrants to this country; Arabs and people from East Asia and India were excluded altogether. During the 1930s anti-Semitism in the United States limited German-Jewish immigration to a mere fraction of the allotted quota, with tragic results.
In similar fashion, labor unrest often led to battles among workers and between workers and employers, some of them deadly enough to be called massacres. Between 1900 and 1999 only thirteen individual years passed without notable, often bloody, strikes in the agricultural, mining, and manufacturing sectors.
Racial conflict was also widespread. Where Jim Crow did not prevail, the Ku Klux Klan and vigilantism did. Race riots occurred throughout the century, including during the First and Second World Wars. During the Second World War, for instance, there were hundreds of major strikes, some of them to protest the hiring of black workers in defense industries. By instituting a federal Fair Employment Practice Commission, in 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt narrowly averted a march on Washington by blacks protesting discriminatory defense industry hiring practices. In addition to protests by or about blacks, the century also saw anti-Greek, Hispanic/Latino, Puerto Rican, and Filipino riots. Clearly then, wars, a long period of economic depression, or intervals of prosperity and industrial growth never completely united Americans as a people.
In response to widespread prejudice and discrimination, resistance and advocacy groups sprang up throughout the twentieth century. They included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909), the National Urban League (1910), the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (1913), and more recently the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1960), the Irish American Cultural Institute (1962), the National Organization for Women (1966), the National Italian American Foundation (1975), the Human Rights Campaign (founded in 1980 as the Human Rights Campaign Fund, focusing on the election of candidates willing to treat LGBTQ issues equitably), and the American Association of People with Disabilities (1995) to name only a few. Although these dates would imply a period of quiescence through midcentury, this was not the case. For instance, the Congress of Racial Equality was founded in 1942 and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957.
Just as important, another thread of state and local activism, sometimes called the Civic Unity Movement, began to appear. Writing in 1951, the director of the Center for Human Relations Studies in New York, Dan W. Dodson, noted,
It was clear that the [Second World War] had forced a showdown on the second-class citizenship status of Negro citizens. It was also clear that in addition to the national aspect of the issue, it was also a community problem. Another revelation was the fact that municipal governments were woefully unprepared and inexperienced either to understand the problem or to deal with it. These conditions led to a new instrumentality of municipal government, namely, a commission in the office of the mayor composed of leading citizens charged with the responsibility of doing what they could to promote better intergroup relations within the community.
In this vein Maryland, which had instituted an Interracial Commission in 1927, renamed it in 1943 the Commission to Study Problems Affecting the Colored Population. In Detroit the Mayor’s Interracial Committee was founded in late 1943, the same year Los Angeles set up a Joint Committee for Interracial Progress, Chicago started its Mayor’s Committee on Race Relations, and St. Louis began a Race Relations Commission. New York City set up the Mayor’s Committee on Unity and Seattle started its Civic Unity Committee in 1944, while the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations was founded in 1951. Spurred by the rise of racial tensions during the Second World War, by 1950 there were fifty-two municipal “intergroup relations” committees operating in seventeen states. In the words of one commentator, “Every week, it seemed, some new program of intercultural education, or interracial good-will, or another council on unity and amity appeared.”
It is against this backdrop that the Cincinnati Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee (MFRC) was formed—not only as the local manifestation of a national trend, but more specifically in response to developments in Detroit.
. . .
In the summer of 1943 Cincinnati was worried. Earlier in the year, race rioting in Detroit had left thirty-four people dead, hundreds injured, and portions of the city in ashes. Racial tensions in Cincinnati were no different than in its smoldering counterpart to the north. Black women and men were engaged in the war effort as soldiers and defense workers, but most of Cincinnati’s synagogues, churches, neighborhoods, and schools remained segregated, while discrimination was the norm in local government, labor unions, colleges, restaurants, swimming pools, skating rinks, hospitals, department stores, amusement parks, and movie theaters. Blacks in Cincinnati were just as frustrated with the racial status quo as their counterparts in Detroit.
Two months after the Detroit riot Arnold B. Walker, writing in the Division of Negro Welfare Bulletin, posed the question on everyone’s mind: “Will There Be a Race Riot in Cincinnati?” Despite his acknowledgment of the prevailing racial tensions in the city, Walker concluded there would be no race riot in the city.
Nonetheless, the specter of Detroit loomed large in Cincinnati. Walker participated in a meeting with NAACP members and Mayor James G. Stewart just over two weeks after the Detroit riot to discuss ways to avoid similar turmoil in Cincinnati; the meeting was promoted under the heading This Must Not Happen Here. In the meeting it was agreed the mayor should convene a cross-section of citizens to form a “citizens committee on unity.” On October 7, Stewart convened a group with representation from the Division of Negro Welfare, B’nai B’rith, the Council of Churches, the Public Recreation Commission, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Catholic Charities, the Chamber of Commerce, and the black professional men in the Frontier Club with the aim of forming an intergroup relations committee sponsored by the city. On November 17 the Cincinnati City Council approved formation of the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee (MFRC).
The city had a history of human relations initiatives before the immediate crisis of the Detroit riot, including those initiated by the Negro Civic Welfare Association (which later became the Greater Cincinnati Urban League) and the Woman’s City Club of Greater Cincinnati (WCC). By 1927, for instance, the WCC had a race relations committee that actively promoted interracial understanding across the city, and in the early 1940s it founded the Fellowship House, an integrated organization dedicated to promoting interracial and ecumenical cooperation. Virginia Coffey, who would join the MFRC as assistant director in 1948, was an active participant in Fellowship House programs and was among the earliest black women admitted to membership in the Woman’s City Club, in the late 1940s. Three presidents of the WCC would serve on the Mayor’s Friendly Relations Committee, while others would serve on its successor, the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission. Although not directly rooted in the work of the WCC, these agencies would certainly be influenced by it. That influence apparently ran both ways because in the 1960s Coffey and her successor as assistant director at the MFRC, Eugene Sparrow, would be invited to speak at the WCC’s civic luncheon on race and other human relations issues.
In addition to promoting racial peace and wartime
